


In This Room I Knew We Were Alive

by LilacsLast



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Ableist Language, Bipolar Disorder, Catholic Character, F/M, Postpartum Depression, Roman Catholicism, Suicidal Thoughts, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 03:32:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7874539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilacsLast/pseuds/LilacsLast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not okay but one day it might be. Someday Jack, and maybe Matt, will forgive her. She repeats this, like a prayer, like a song she’s trying to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Room I Knew We Were Alive

**Author's Note:**

> This turned out to be way more abstract than it was originally meant be so there's that.
> 
> I do want to say that I do not have bipolar disorder, though, I do have a history of depression and I did a fair amount of research while writing this. However, the only knowledge I have of Psychology comes from the B I got during my semester of AP Psych two years ago so if you think I got anything wrong, I'll totally be willing to change it. 
> 
> There are also two fanmixes for this work which are really just the playlists I listened to while writing. One for [Jack](http://8tracks.com/murdo-ck/jack) and one for [Maggie](http://8tracks.com/murdo-ck/maggie).

Maggie remembers the first time she sees Jack Murdock. 

The beach at Coney Island, the summer before her senior year of high school. It is so fucking hot that she sweats even stripped down to her bikini and Daisy Dukes. That could just be because she is pressed between his skin and the warm sand. She is drunk and giggly. When they kiss he tastes like cooper and beer and nachos, which for an inexperienced seventeen-year-old is okay. 

His eye is black and blue but besides that he looks like an Irish, James Dean. You have squint to see it.

The thought makes her giggle into his mouth. He pulls away, asks her what the problem is. 

“Nothing, you’re just cute,” 

The dumb gaping fish look on his face disappears into a grin.

“So are you,” He kisses her again. 

_______________________

In three months Maggie has learned Jack Murdock like she learned the piano, notes at a time. 

Jack is few years older than her. Catholic, Irish. 

His favorite drink is Scotch. 

He loves the Yankees but the Giants can suck it. 

He loves his mother more than anything. 

His favorite words are cusses. 

He’s a boxer. Not a particularly good one. He gets knocked down a lot. He has cauliflower ears and a chipped tooth. He stares at her through black eyes and kisses her with broken, scabbed lips, runs broken-knuckle callous-covered hands along her body. 

Everything about Jack Murdock is rough except the way he makes Maggie feel. Nothing is better than the way he says ‘I love you’ in November. They’re standing on the curb waiting for the bus that will take Maggie home and, Jesus, it’s cold. Maggie is so cold she can see her own breath. Her cheeks are red and winds been whipping up her uniform skirt all day. Knee socks don’t help.

Jack’s words warm her up from the inside out. Her heart constricts and seems to send heat out throughout her body from her cheeks to her fingertips to her toes. She feels warm. His words are prettier than any song she ever learned to play or any prayer she’s ever repeated before any altar. Jack is her altar. Sacrilege and she doesn’t care. 

She reaches up and takes his face in her gloved hands and kisses his chapped and broken lips.

_______________________

 

Maggie practices. She plays jingle bells three times and Silent Night twice and starts Auld Lang Syne. 

Someone is crying upstairs. Her mother is shouting. There is a garbage truck coming down the street. All the noise crowds her brain, makes thinking almost impossible. Maggie doesn’t like to be in her head too much. Sometimes she gets stuck in there.

She gets in moods sometimes. Sometimes for weeks she’ll be stuck, thoughts will come slow. All she wants is to crawl into bed and sleep for days. It’s a strange concoction of numb and sad. Everything is blurry like trying to live with a sheet over her head. Like a ghost costume. She feels like a ghost at those times, almost dead. 

Sometimes, it’s like she couldn’t be more alive. It’s an inability to sit still, an energy that creeps into everything. Her thoughts come and go like highway traffic. Every part of Maggie’s body roars with an untamable fire. It’s hard not to burn up when you haven’t slept in three days.

Sometimes, most of the time, she feels like she’s anticipating the plunge.

Maggie wonders how Jack would deal if he knew. She’s lost friends because they say she’s unreliable, too much or not enough for them. She’s prayed about it. She talked to Father Gregory at school but he just says to pray more.

She doesn’t know what she’d do if Jack left her because she went nuts on him. She hopes she never has to deal with it. She’s been dangling on the precipice for months, waiting to fall over. She’s started wondering if she’s never going to again, hoping that’s the case.

_______________________

 

Speak of the Devil right? 

One day she wakes up and doesn’t go to sleep for two days. She does her homework scribbled during a 40 minute study hall and finishes it. She prays eight times a day and practices the piano again each time. It’s how she counts them.

The Christmas concert is coming up. Jack is going and she has to be good for him. Better than good, the best. 

_______________________

After the concert, her parents let her go to dinner with friends in the city but really it’s just Jack. They go to a bar. He buys her a drink and three hours later they are laying in his bed, half dressed and holding hands. She is tucked into his chest. Only the street light illuminates the room while passing cars made shadows of light on the ceiling. Jack talks to her, almost into sleep. Or he is on the edge of it. Sleep doesn’t come easy for her. She feels the rumbling energy of each passing car in her veins. 

“I’ll buy you a car. Whatever kind you want. And a house. A big old house in Jersey or Long Island. We’ll paint it white and you can put some of those stone lions out front.” She hums. Stone Lions. “How many kids you want?”

Maggie’s eyes pop open and she looks up at him. “That’s not very romantic,” 

“I can’t think of anything more romantic than having a baby with you,” Jack says earnestly. She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she bets he’s smiling stupidly. Maggie feels her stomach curl. “Honest. A baby is part of both of us. A living breathing thing.” 

“If I was pregnant, I’d just be fat and ugly. You wouldn’t want to touch me or even look at me.” She persists. She thinks of having to care for a baby. Diapers and bottles and socks. She’s swimming in them until she can’t breathe. The comforter and sheets are too much.

“What? Mags, I’d never--”

“Nonononono,” Maggie flings the covers off of her body and crawls on hands and knees to the end of the bed. “Nonononono,” She shakes her head. Tears well up. She can’t live in this shitty apartment forever with a baby in every corner like the old lady who lived in a shoe. God, please, she prays. She cries, hands in her hair.

“Hey, hey,” Jack has his hands on her face, her bare thighs. “Shhh,”

“I can’t do it,” She shakes her head. “I can’t have a baby. I’d be so terrible! I can’t be my mother! Please, Jack, don’t make me,”

Jack pulls her against his chest and she sobs. “I’m not making you do anything. I-I just asked... It doesn’t matter. No babies. Not now.” He pets her hair and pulls her even closer. Sooner or later, she stops crying. He coaxes her back under the sheet with “Come on, it’s too cold,” 

He wraps his arms around her and in minutes his grip slackens and his breathing evens out. Maggie can’t make herself do the same because he’d said “not now” instead of “not ever.” He expects her to have a baby someday. Today or tomorrow but he thinks he'll change her, trap her here like he has with the arm over her back. She slips from under it and lays on her back beside him, watching cars pass on the ceiling. With each one, dread grows in the pit of her stomach like an expanding balloon as he snores beside her. She tries to pray but her prayers die never leave her heart, crushed by the balloon.

_______________________

A week later she can’t get out of bed and on New Years her family goes out. Jack climbs in her bedroom window, curls up next to her and just holds her. 

Jack says “I love you.” It’s a prayer if she ever heard one. 

_______________________

They have a date on Valentine’s Day. Not a session of petting on the L train followed by bodega wine and boxed mac and cheese. Not a shitty bar for shitty beer and then drunken sex and late night tv. A real honest to God date and a movie. 

If Jack shows up. 

Maggie sits in the booth in the nice Italian restaurant getting her water topped off for two hours. She is furious by the time the waitress, Betty Firenzo, who is was in her Chemistry class sophomore year, nearly begs her to take a complimentary dessert. It is a piece of key lime pie that Maggie wants to smash in Jack’s face. She can’t help imagining him out with girls in shorter dresses than her who aren’t crazy.

Jack’s neighbor buzzes her into his building because Maggie spins some story about wanting to surprise Jack for his birthday. She knows where Jack keeps his spare key and if he isn’t in bed already with some floozy, she is going to wait for him to get back and give him what for.

Jack’s apartment isn’t much to look at. The place is fake wood paneling and cheap curbside furniture, a half busted tv and dusty shelves. Maggie sits down on at the tiny kitchen table and waits.

Eventually Jack shows up but he’s not with some slut. He’s alone and bleeding. 

“Jesus,” She says at the sight of him and he looks at her in surprise. 

“Shit, I forgot,” He smiles at her with red teeth. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” It’s some kind of irony right there.

“Yeah,” She frowns, unable to be mad at him when the blood is flowing from his nose and blotting his white shirt like that. She stands and goes to the sink and wets a hand towel. He takes it thankfully. “What happened?”

“Irish mob,” He dabs his nose. She raises an eyebrow. “It’s not a joke. Mob runs the boxing racket in this city. They want to get me in their pocket.”

“And you said no.”

“If I’m gonna win or lose, it’ll be my doing,”

"My man's got morals and another broken nose,"

"You think I shoulda said 'yes'?" Jack 

“It would be easier on your nose if you said ‘yes.’” She grimaces just looking at it. 

“You gonna leave me cuz my nose is fucked up?” Jack teases and looks at all the blood staining the dish towel.

“I’ll leave you cuz Betty Firenzo's gonna tell everyone at school I got stood up on Valentine's Day,” 

“I’ll make it up to you,” He says with a grin and walks her backward until she’s trapped between the hard line of his stomach and the countertop. 

“Oh, yeah?” She says. He lips are on hers and everything is iron and warmth and Jack. Nothing in the world matters but him as he moves from her mouth to her neck, unbuttoning her shirt along the way. 

_______________________

Before Easter they hold confession at school for all those kids that don’t go regularly. Maggie used to go once a month but she hasn’t in awhile. Not because her faith is less or anything it’s just that the thing she knows she should be confessing, she doesn’t want to. God already knows it all doesn’t He?

_______________________

Maggie graduates high school. Maggie gets a job down at Coney Island. Jack does too.

Maggie counts the days of summer in Jack’s injuries and Jack’s kisses. 

_______________________

In September, there are ten pregnancy tests in the sink and Maggie curls up on the bathroom floor, between the toilet and the tub. She has been crying but she’s all dried up now. The sobs keep coming one after another muffled by her wet jeans.

This couldn’t have been happening. It is a terribly bad dream. She needs to wake up. It is a dream. It is a dream. She slaps herself across the face which seems to knocked some more tears loose.

She has died and she is in hell. This is her personal hell. It is everything Maggie never wanted. She remembers that night months ago when Jack mentioned having a baby. She’d cried that night at the very idea. Here she is on her way there. Her body is now the slave to a parasite sharing her every breath. 

She can’t breath. 

Jack wouldn’t be able to look at her the right way. He’d see her the same way he looked at the engine of a car. A machine, like any other doing a job. She is his in all the ways she never wanted to be. He is the one who brought up kids in the first place.

“Maggie!” That's Jack back from the gym. “Maggie! You here? I thought you’d have gone home already.” She wants to retch and perhaps would if her breakfast hadn’t already sacrificed itself to morning sickness. She hides her face in her jeans and concentrates on getting air into her lungs. 

He walks into the bathroom and he must see the tests first thing because he says nothing. Maggie can’t bring herself to look at him. “Ohmygod,”

She sobs. 

“Maggie, is this for real?” He’s on his knees in front of her. She looks up at him and nods. He gapes like a fish and then he smiles. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

Except, except, she doesn’t want to figure it out. She wants it all to stop. Just stop. 

“This,” Jack says because he's not the one pregnant. “This is a miracle,” 

“Nononono,” She stands up and pushes past him, out of the bathroom. He follows her, grabs her wrist. She pulls away again and runs into the tiny kitchen. There’s nowhere to go in there. He’ll have her cornered in a moment.

“Maggie, come on,” He says. “It’s gonna be okay,”

“You don’t understand, Jack! My mother is going to kill me! My father is doing to kill you!” She hiccups into her sleeve. “They’re going to make us get married and then they’re going to kill us!” Marriage is the real thing she's scared up. 

“Who cares about them!” He shouts and reaches for her wrist again. “This is our baby. We’ll figure it out.”

And no, Maggie can’t think of this as our baby, not now, not yet, perhaps not ever. There’s a glass on the counter full of water. She makes a fierce grab for it and throws it with all her might at Jack’s chest. It shatters. Water and glass fly everywhere.

Maggie instinctively shields her face and her stomach. The glass and the water don’t hit her though. Neither does Jack. That’sthe truly shocking part.

He just stares at her as his white tee-shirt runs with water and red blood. She blinks at him and wraps her arms around her belly. Neither of them move.

_______________________

It is decided, somewhere between the doctor in the ER digging the glass shard out of Jack’s chest and confirming that, yes, Maggie is really pregnant, that they are getting married. Neither of them question it, good Catholic kids that they are.

She is going to the be the ol’ ball and chain now, stuck with Jack forever. She is the dead weight in that metaphor.

And it is apt because she feel numbness creeping over her the same way she sees the sun setting on their subway ride to the Bronx. 

They go to her parent’s house, with Jack’s chest wrapped like a mummy’s. They explain everything, including the marriage. Neither of her parents threaten murder. They strain to be civil but her mother cries. Maggie thinks it might not have be a bad cry because she is talking about wedding dresses at the time. Her father refuses to pay for it.

Jack’s mother takes the news much better. Jack is an only child and his father died when he was a teenager. She offers Maggie her own wedding dress with the biggest smile Maggie has ever seen. Maggie thanks her and as she says the words, it’s all she can do not to throw up. 

_______________________

What comes next is unbearable. It’s like having the flu. Maggie stops going out. She stops praying at all. She stops playing the piano. Her mother has to force her to eat. Some days she doesn’t get out of bed, lethargic and yet unable to sleep. The little twin bed is a haven away from the world, not because it makes her feel any less safe or hurt less, but because she physically can’t make herself move. She's a ghost under her white sheets.

Late at night, one of her sisters wakes up crying and Maggie can hear her mother singing lullabies to her. Maggie can never do that. Her kid will have a mother who can’t even get up in the morning, let alone at 2 am when they have a nightmare. 

She almost understands God punishing her and Jack. They’re sinners. Wrath and lust on both accounts. Maggie doesn’t get why God is punishing the baby inside her though unless it’s evil inside her. 

Every morning she goes to the bathroom to vomit and sees her father's razor on the counter. She wants so badly to press it into her wrists and let everything evil drain out of her.

_______________________

Maggie is in the basement of Jack’s church, already decorated for the reception, wearing a white dress and trying in vain to find the best bouquet placement to cover an eighteen week baby bump. Her mother disappeared somewhere because one of the flower girls was crying upstairs.

“Bridget’s got a set of lungs on her. She’s louder than the organ.” Maggie looks up from her bouquet. Jack has a smirk on his face. There are stitches above his eye that weren’t there yesterday. “You look beautiful,” 

She knows he's lying or at least looking at her in his own brand of rose colored classes. They're more like amber colored. If he hasn’t found his courage in a bottle, she’ll be shocked. 

“You’re not allowed to see the bride before the wedding,” 

“Well, I’d wager we did more than a few things we weren’t supposed too before the wedding.” He smirks at her again and walks closer to wrap his arms around her. “It think this little guy goes to show it,” He kisses her neck and it tickles.

“Stop it,” She pushes him away lightly.

“Why?” He kisses her again. “I’m gonna be doing this in front of everyone in an hour anyway.” 

“You’ll mess up my makeup. My mom worked hard on it!” She laughs like an untuned piano but Jack doesn’t notice. 

_______________________

The first time she feels happy is when she feels the baby move. She’s lying in bed and then there’s a kick. Then another. She wakes Jack up to feel it and he smiles. She smiles. Maybe. Maybe they can do this. 

Maybe they’re standing in shoes that don’t fit them but maybe they’ll grow into them. In that moment she hopes, she prays.

_______________________

Sometimes Maggie thinks Jack likes getting hit. He won’t tell the Irish "yes" so he comes home looking like someone decided to test our their new meat tenderizer on his face. 

And one of these times they might decide he’s not worth the effort. Or he’ll get drunk and pick a fight with the wrong guy at a bar. Or he’ll get mugged on the street by the wrong dumb teenager. 

All Maggie can do is sit at home, getting bigger every minute and twisting the wedding ring around her finger. She tells him they have to do better. That there is a child inside of her but the next night he comes back bleeding and she has to stitch his face shut with blood stained hands. It gets under her wedding ring and dries there.

Someday Jack isn’t going to come back to her and she’s going to take the ring off and put it away but she can’t take his baby out of her. She'll have a son that looks just like him and he'll go out and get hit everyday. And Maggie will feel her heart tearing apart every time. She remember just how much she can't do this.

_______________________

April 10th 1988, Maggie has a boy. They name him Matthew Michael Murdock, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he’s beautiful. Beautiful like an angel sent down from heaven to save her. Maggie cannot imagine how there was a time when she didn’t want him. 

Her mother offers to stay with them. Like Maggie can’t take care of her husband and her child. Like she’s helpless. Being a mother is easy. Matt is easy. Maybe it was hard for her mother but Maggie’s not her mother. She’s better. 

She’s good at this. Finally good at something. And Matt is just perfect.

_______________________

Matt is a demon. She is the only one who can see it. He tricks everyone else but Maggie knows. She knows what’s under that cherubic smile. 

He sends her sleepless nights. He sends spiders on her skin that keep her awake and cries just as exhaustion is about to take her. 

Maggie can almost see the horns on his head. 

She wonders if this is the sweet cooing baby she brought home. If he has been this way the whole time. If he even had her tricked for a time. If he’s been biding his time, lying in wait, holding his breath. He’s going to strike. 

Jack doesn’t see it and Maggie has to do something about it.

She goes to the church and gets holy water for the house. When Father comes out to speak with her, he bends for the stroller and talks to Matt in a cooing voice. He can’t see it either. The little devil’s tricked him too.

That night Maggie dumps the whole bottle of holy water in Matt’s bath but he just goes on screaming bloody murder like normal.

_______________________

_Matt’s not breathing. “Jack! Jack Matt’s not breathing.”_

It’s raining and she’s running. Crying but she can’t tell the difference between the tears and rain.

_“Jesus Fucking Christ, Maggie.”_

There’s a church on the corner. Is it Jack’s church? She can’t remember. She walks into the vestibule and immediately collapses against a wall and sobs. In her head, Jack is still yelling. 

_“You’re fucking crazy, Maggie! He’s a baby! He’s your baby!”_

Thunder claps outside. A priest comes to Maggie and offers her a hand. How can she even know he is there? She stands and walks her downstairs to the church hall. This is Jack’s church but she doesn’t recognize this priest. 

_Jack is pulling Matt from her tight grasp. He’s doing CPR best he knows how._

He gets her some clothes from a pile of donations for the homeless shelter. She changes in the lady’s restroom and she comes out he’s sitting at a table waiting for her. “Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee,” She can’t believe how mundane this is when she wants to scream. She just tried to kill her baby and yet she’s sitting here drinking coffee.

“What brings you here, my dear?” The Father says.

_“Call 911,” Jack yells at her. “Go!” He yells again and she goes to the phone on the wall. She dials and then she runs while Jack is pumping life into their son._

“I need help,”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” He says. “The Lord helps all,”

“I don't know if he can,” Maggie shakes her head. “I tried to kill my son tonight.”

The priest doesn’t blanch or spit out his coffee. She’ll give him credit for it. “Is your son alright? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

“My husband was there,” She feels tears in her eyes again and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her borrowed sweatshirt. “I never wanted him, but I never wanted to hurt him. Things in my head...they don’t make sense sometimes. I was seeing things. I saw the devil. I thought my baby was the devil...”

“Sometimes, when we’re hurting we lash out and hurt people we love,” He reaches across the table and takes her hand. “I could make some calls. I have a friend who works as a psychologist at Fordham.”

“Thank you, Father,”

“Lantom,” He smiles.

“Maggie,” She tries to smile back and fails miserably. 

_______________________

A short nun in a black habit shows her to a room. When she sees the small bed with the crucifix hanging above it, she almost cries. She kneels beside it.

Hail Mary, full of grace…

It’s not okay. Some shoes are never going to fit. Some songs you never learn to play. Some boys are just for kissing on hot summer days. It’s okay to not be okay. Someday Jack, maybe Matt, will forgive her. She repeats this, like a prayer, like a song she’s trying to learn.


End file.
